The 2017-2022 plan offers 70% of economically recoverable resources in the OCS while ensuring protection of regions with critical ecological resources, including the Arctic.
US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said: “The plan focuses lease sales in the best places – those with the highest resource potential, lowest conflict, and established infrastructure – and removes regions that are simply not right to lease,” said
“Given the unique and challenging Arctic environment and industry’s declining interest in the area, forgoing lease sales in the Arctic is the right path forward.”
The government plans to offer 11 potential lease sales including 10 lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one lease sale in the Cook Inlet off the southern coast of Alaska.
However, upon assessing best available scientific data, the DOI has excluded the two Alaska lease sales, one each in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, in the proposed final program.
According to Interior Department’s technical analysts, the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, which form one of the most prospective basins in the world, are estimated to hold 23.6 billion barrels of oil and 104.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Commenting on the decision to remove drilling plan in the US Arctic waters, Greenpeace executive director Annie Leonard said: “We urge the President to do all he can to permanently protect US waters from the disaster of offshore drilling and to move toward no new leases anywhere–not in the Arctic, not in the Atlantic or Pacific, and not in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Image: Offshore oil and gas operations. Photo: courtesy of by Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement/U.S. Department of the Interior.
